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We're going to play a little game that Stephan Jost, director of Shelburne Museum, imagined.

The game is called Expand the Brand. The brand that Jost contends is ripe for expanding is well known to all of us.

It's the state of Vermont.

Jost believes Vermont has already busted out of its brand, or cultural image, which perhaps stagnated more than half a century back.

The Vermont icons to expand on, as described by Jost, are:

ē Maple syrup

ē Covered bridges

ē Red barns

"I have no problems with those things, but we have a gap there," Jost said. "We're still a culture that is looking at what resonated 50 years ago."

Jost and I goofed around with Expand the Brand last week drinking hot cider with echinacea at Muddy Waters. The setting, by coincidence, happened to fit my answer pretty well: Hippies. This answer sprang from the first thing I blurted out: "Phish."

At supper the same night, I played Expand the Brand with my 12-year-old daughter. "Burton," she said, without hesitation. My artist sister, who lives in Philadelphia and likes to visit, answered: "Blank billboards."

OK, you get the idea. But why does it matter? Who cares?

It matters, because perhaps we're excluding from the cultural conversation interesting and important features of the state. There are more interesting things going on in Vermont — not just branding, but the action that drives and defines the brand — than we culturally acknowledge, Jost says.

"The reality of America is that dramatic cultural changes have happened," Jost said. "It's very important that, culturally, our brand can resonate and include the changes that have happened in the nation. Many of our kids are going to live out of this state, and they need to be culturally literate about what it means to be in a culturally dynamic and diverse country. Let's crack the brand open to be inclusive."

What about a farmers' market; a solar panel; a pot leaf; progressive politics? Each of these says something about Vermont in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

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"How is Phish, or the culture of Phish and Bread and Puppet, heralded through the institutions of Vermont, through the state?" Jost asked. "Culturally, the thing that has resonated for the last 50 years comes from this moment."

The moment Jost was referring to is the hippie migration to Vermont in the 1960s and '70s, and its influence and impact on the state. For a more recent cultural phenomenon, Jost turns to snowboarding.

"Think about the culture of snowboarding," he said. "It's rooted in Vermont, a global phenomenon. The fashion is coming out of Vermont. We don't acknowledge it in the same way Paris acknowledges Chanel. We're doing it, but we're not acknowledging it."

The value of acknowledging it has to do with the global world we live in: preparing Vermont children for entry into that world, and drawing and welcoming to Vermont a diverse population, Jost said. Recognizing a richer and more varied culture might foster cultural experimentation and innovation, he said.

"Does a conservative brand prevent cultural innovation?" Jost asked. "You have to be open to failure. You can't have a dynamic culture, if you don't invest in pie-in-the-sky ideas. ...

"Vermonters interrogate any new idea a great deal before it's implemented, which has plusses. Once the public decided Bernie Sanders was a good guy, they had done their interrogation. In California, every new idea is seen as good. The result: Silicon Valley — which took huge amounts of experimentation and risk."

Rick Machanic, founder and president of Tag New Media, runs a growing, Burlington-based interactive communications company. He is part of a new affiliation of local designers, marketing and new media firms, the Native Creative Consortium, that is considering "the brand that is Vermont."

The idea is to distinguish Vermont as a "progressive, innovative and relevant" place for "creative thinking and execution," according to the consortium.

These qualities speak to a certain piece of the Vermont brand, and are important for nurturing its growth, Machanic said. A primary reason for forming the affiliation is to keep in Vermont, and attract to it, talented young people. This will benefit the company's themselves, as well as the greater community — providing thoughtful leadership for the future, he said.

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"There's a desire within the creative community in the state to try to keep the best and brightest here," Machanic said. "We want to keep the younger vibe, the younger energy, the younger mind set here in Vermont. And also to recruit."

A Vermont brand that can exploit that desire is demonstrating that in a mobile, high-tech society, you can choose where you want to live, and make interesting things happen there, Machanic said.

For free-thinkers in their professional and personal lives, for creative and progressive people, Vermont is an "amazing place to live where you can do amazing work," Machanic says.

"We want to do our part to show you can live here and also have (professional) opportunities outside the state," Machanic said. "So they don't think we're some kind of backwater, or a place hippies go to do whatever."

Instead, Vermont is better understood as a place with a "Yankee, do-it-yourself spirit," Machanic said.

"There's a very strong and positive entrepreneurial vibe in this state," he said, citing Ben & Jerry's and Burton Snowboards as two examples.

"I think the arts are one of our strengths," he said. "I see Vermont as a very progressive place in terms of politics and policy, and the humanity we have for one another."

Burton, and the style and culture attached to it, is a Vermont brand that resonates around the world. It is shaped and carried forward by young people, and a kind of pushing-the-boundaries freedom and spirit. (This youthful population, and its ideas and energy, is the same one Machanic wants Vermont's creative community to embrace.)

"Burton is here because Jake and I love Vermont," Donna Carpenter, co-owner of Burton Snowboards, wrote in an e-mail from Japan. She was there on business with her husband, Jake Burton Carpenter, who started Burton in a southern Vermont barn.

"Vermont is where Jake and I met, grew Burton and raised our three sons," Donna Carpenter wrote. "We love the sense of community, the landscape, the people and its values. More than anything else, I think Vermont has a very independent spirit, and so does snowboarding and Burton as a brand."

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Frank Bryan, a political scientist at the University of Vermont, grew up in Newbury. He is an expert on town meetings — a Vermont institution named by several people in the Expand the Brand game.

"I think we're searching for icons," Bryan said. "I think we've lost the old identity, and we're not really sure what we are. We're kind of ambivalent."

The ambivalence centers around a tension Bryan identifies as springing from two population waves that occurred over the past half century.

The first is the influx of "hippies and lefties," Bryan said. "People who wanted to live in tents and communes and bring peace to the world," he said. "These people came for ideological reasons. They wanted to live small."

The second wave, Bryan asserts, has been more key to economic development. He describes this group as older, more professional and more stable.

They're looking for a modern lifestyle, but one that's in sync with the image they had of Vermont as a quiet and peaceful place," he said. "They want Vermont to look like it was supposed to, given the old icons."

The tension is: How do you live that, in reality? How does real life match the vision?

"How do you have that kind of beautiful, small Vermont ambience and make it work economically?" Bryan said. "You can't live in a tent: the winters are cold and they last a long time."

The perception of a place matters because "artificiality never works," Bryan said.

"It's got be an authentic reflection of culture," he said. "I think the old pattern was. I'm not sure this one is. If the perception is not a real reflection of culture, then it's not sustainable."

Big red barns were built into the hillside so you could back a team of horses into the barn, without having to steer the animals up hill much, Bryan said. Bridges were covered to keep the timbers from rotting.

"The old icon was real," he said.

The third old icon suggested by Jost — maple syrup — is immortalized on the Vermont state quarter, a coin that was introduced in 2001. The coin shows two bare maple trees standing against a backdrop of Camels Hump. Buckets hang from the tree trunks; a Vermonter in scarf and hat is collecting sap.

The image itself is etched in the past. Maple sugaring is a contemporary activity - but they don't make it like they used to.